A Glorious Reading Life, 3,599 Books Later
I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.
-Jorge Luis Borges
So did Dan Pelzer.
Earlier this year, the Ohio-based correctional facility social worker, died at 92. He didn’t leave behind a business empire or a political dynasty. He left behind something far better: a long, delicious, lovingly kept handwritten list of every book he’d read since 1962, when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. All 3,599 of them.
Dan's grown children had the good sense to digitize the whole thing and put it online. Purists can browse it as a complete scan or for those who prefer to spelunk through history with CTRL+F there's a fully searchable PDF.
Taken together, Pelzer's list reads like a six-decade cultural core sample. You get the big hitters — Anna Karenina, Brave New World, The Iliad — and the obvious completist flexes, like all eleven volumes of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization. But there are also quirks: he read only six of the twelve volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, and not in order. Apparently he started with the eleventh and ended with the tenth.
What I love most about Pelzer's list is his gloriously undisciplined reading range. From the history of Christianity and Western Civilization to his apparent love for thrillers, spy yarns, and the occasional intense war memoir (Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War.
Pelzer appeared to move effortlessly through a juxtapositional minefield that would have confused, confounded, or fully unwound a lessor reader. Imagine spending a week with Ayn Rand and then moving onto Carl Sagan. Or going from Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose — talk of whiplashing from impeccable history to literary labyrinth.
Dan was my kind of reader. Someone who refused to live in an intellectual gated community. His list jumps from The Power and the Glory to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to Silent Spring to The Godfather.
Pelzer also had streaks: multiple books by C.S. Forester in a row, more than one full sweep of Tolkien, a long run through Churchill's The Second World War, and full-on a Michener binge-out: Hawaii, The Source, Centennial, Chesapeake.
The real joy of reading isn't in the tally, but in the way every book leaves its mark, quietly altering how you see the world, and yourself. Dan Pelzer spent sixty years in conversation with thousands of voices that together told the story of a life fully engaged with the world.
Long live the common reader.
Long live Dan's family for gifting us their dad's glorious reading list.
And long live Dan's splendid, delightful, magnificent, scrumptious reading list.